Card marketer names new CTO

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Brian Michon was named chief technology officer at Cartera Commerce, a Boston-based provider of card-based marketing solutions for merchants, banks and loyalty programs.

In his new role at Cartera, Michon, a former vp of engineering at Intuit, is expected to drive Cartera’s card-linked offer technology strategy and lead the company’s development, operations and solution delivery teams.

"It’s not often you get the opportunity to board a speeding, category-creation train like Cartera, a company that is building an entirely new marketing channel," Michon said. "CLOs (card-linked offers) are clearly the future of performance marketing for merchants – from the smallest mom and pops to the largest big box brands – and I’m thrilled to be joining the front runner in the space at a time when there is so much market opportunity ahead."

Most recently, Michon ran engineering at online privacy company Abine, where he helped deliver privacy-protection software to more than three million users. He also co-founded startup Apps.com, which was purchased by Intuit, led Core Technologies at Linden Lab and directed engineering at Think New Ideas, an e-marketing company in the Omnicom portfolio.

Cartera connects some of the nation’s top merchants to more than 150 million of the top spenders through offers linked to their top-of-wallet credit and debit cards. Through proprietary marketing programs, Cartera delivers personalized offers to consumers based on their anonymous, private purchasing preferences. Consumers redeem offers with just a card swipe and automatically earn preferred rewards such as cash back, miles or points. The strategy enables merchants to gain new customers, increase loyalty and grow market share on a performance basis, while card issuers gain new revenue streams and improve cardmember spend and loyalty.

"Card-linked marketing is, at its core, a big-data technology challenge – one we’ve solved over the past few years by partnering with the leading issuers, sourcing offers from the best national and local merchants, and delivering those offers to consumers through their preferred marketing channels while respecting data privacy and anonymity," said Tom Beecher, president and CEO of Cartera Commerce. "With the market poised to explode, we knew the time was right to appoint a CTO of Brian’s caliber. His impressive industry knowledge and privacy expertise will take our platform and solution delivery to the next level. I look forward to working with Brian to maintain our current momentum and deliver on our next-generation platform vision this year and beyond."